New lower Azure pricing

As part of our continued commitment to deliver Azure to customers at the best possible prices, effective October 1st, we are lowering prices on many of our most popular virtual machines (VMs). The rest of this blog covers key highlights, but if you are ready to learn more, please check out our redesigned website that makes it easier for you identify the VM categories that map to your use cases and find their prices across our regions.

Here is the summary of the changes:

General Purpose Instances: Prices of our Dv2 series VMs will be reduced by up to 15%. We are also lowering prices of our A1 and A2 Basic VMs by up to 50%.

Compute Optimized Instances: Prices of our F series will be reduced up to 11%.

Av2 series: In November 2016, we will introduce new A series virtual machines (Av2), with prices up to 36% lower than the A series Standard VM prices available today.

In case you’re not familiar with our VM categories, A series VMs are our entry-level compute tier. Dv2 series VMs are our general-purpose tier, with more memory and local SSD storage than A series. F series VMs provide an even higher CPU-to-memory ratio with a lower price than the Dv2 series.

In addition to these reduced prices, for customers using Windows Server with Software Assurance, our recently announced Microsoft Azure Hybrid Use Benefit can help you run Windows Server workloads at 41% lower cost. Starting today, we’re also offering a set of images in our gallery that make it even easier to deploy Windows Server VMs in this way.

We’re excited about what these changes mean for customers and the value they can realize from Azure. For more details, please visit us here.